My name is Will Strohl. I'm a former employee of DNN Corp., a leader, personal branding expert, technologist, gamer, and more...

Google Analytics is often taken-for-granted in too many ways. When the average company thinks about Google Analytics,
they simply ensure their Google Analytics code is in place and they keep track of what I refer to as vanity metrics.
Copy. Paste. Done, right? Vanity metrics are quite deceiving, to be honest, and you’re only scratching the surface
with what you could (and probably should) be doing with Google Analytics. In this article, we’re going to discuss
how to dive deeper into your Google Analytics integration to grow your business.

If you didn’t already know, CMS is an acronym for “content management system.” A CMS is used by many developers, consultancies, and companies to build their website. It’s an incredibly common thing to do, as any flavor of CMS you choose will always save you effort and money, compared to building a website from nothing. This is especially true if you look at the lifetime investment of your website. Using a CMS framework or solution of some kind just seems to make sense. After all, this is what I’ve built my own career upon since 2001. However, then, CMS was known as a portal or portal framework. That’s a long time ago, so it’s not a bad idea to take stock of things every now and thing to see if what you’re doing is the correct thing. To this end, I asked myself, “How is CMS doing right now, and does it make sense to still be doing CMS-related work in the future?”

DNN Corp is on the verge of releasing their latest DNN Platform release, version 9.0.0. As a DNN MVP, I of course had to take a look around at the new stuff coming. It’s still in the early stages though, so there are a few areas where the new updates have some smoothing out to do, but overall, the updates we’re seeing in version 9.0 are very nice. In short, it’s a much more contemporary user experience for all involved – but a very important step in the right direction for the future of all DNN’ers. Here’s my preview and insights after using DNN 9.0 for the first time – a pre-release version of DNN 9.0, that is.

I would imagine that not everyone who reads my blog knows, but as of today, it marks a year that I’ve been going through the process we call grieving. A year ago today, I went through the most traumatic thing a person could go through – I found the person I love more than anything in this world, passed away. My soul mate, lying there, all of my hopes and dreams, lost and crushed in less than a second. Nothing can prepare you for such an abundantly awful thing. Nothing. However, one thing is certain, almost no one on the planet is immune from this experience. No one.

David Poindexter is our guest in this month’s show. David is the “GeekEO” of nvisionative. I’ve interviewed him before in a Hotcakes Hangout, so you can get a lot of information about David and his company nvisionative there. In this show though, we wanted to focus on community activities. David and his fellow DNN’ers in the Charlotte, NC area have been doing great things for years now, so we wanted to pick his brain a bit, and then we finished things off with a very HUGE surprise for the DNN community.

There are two DNN conferences coming up very soon. DNNCon is in April, held in Baltimore, Maryland, and DNN-Connect is in Girona, Spain in June. Our guests are all organizers or co-organizers, and they spend some time with us

In this episode, we decided to have our guest be the topic. The DNN 8 release was so HUUUUUUGE that we felt that it needed to speak for itself. DNN 8 brings with it a ton of new features that developers can take advantage of. These things include new MVC and SPA development patterns. Patterns that never before existed officially and never before came supported out of the box.

While this is nearly a month late in getting posted, the show isn’t any less important. Not by a longshot. In fact, it’s one of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done. In this show, we speak with Ralph Williams. If you’ve been around DNN for any length of time, you know that we all know Ralph for one thing… his amazing theming (skinning) work. He’s one of the minds behind the initial Day of DotNetNuke branding, technical presentations on best practices as it relates to DNN theming, theming training at all of the recent DNNCon events, and wrote the theme chapter in the latest DNN book. In this show, we didn’t speak to Ralph about themes at all. We spoke about the MODULE that he built. Not just any module either… a SPA-based, video-centric LMS module!

This is the second of two special episodes of the DNN Hangout, focused on helping DNN developers world-wide to learn more about the DNN 8 module development patterns. This time, we walked through the MVC development pattern in DNN. Following this hangout, you should have all of the knowledge you need to get started building your module for the DNN 8 Module Development Contest.